POSTPONED: Take a Chance on Embodied Design: From Perceptual Primitives to Conceptual Probability

26
March
2020

14:00-15:30

SCH.0.13 Schofield Building

This seminar will be presented by Professor Dor Abrahamson, Director of the Embodied Design Research Laboratory at the University of California, USA.

WE ARE SORRY TO ANNOUNCE THAT THIS LECTURE HAS BEEN POSTPONED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

In this informal seminar, Professor Dor Abrahamson, Director of the Embodied Design Research Laboratory at the University of California Berkeley, USA, will lead participants through the logic and implementation of an experimental activity for fundamental probability (the case of simple compound events, such as the chance of getting four Heads when flipping four coins).

The activity in question, which is part of a curricular unit, Seeing Chance (https://edrl.berkeley.edu/projects/seeing-chance/), exemplifies the perception-based genre of Abrahamson’s pedagogical framework, embodied design. This activity, which involves sampling from a box of marbles of two colors, and then building the sample space of this random generator, creates opportunities for teachers and students to negotiate and reconcile between naive and mathematical views of random events.

Importantly, the activity positions students’ naive views as agreeing with mathematical analysis, rather than failing to do so, and yet the mathematical analysis is positioned as lending greater argumentative power to students’ correct intuitions, in line with the socio-cognitive norms of disciplinary discourse.

In Seeing Chance, the coordination of naive and mathematical knowledge is essentialized as complementary perceptual constructions of a situation, where both views are legitimate. It’s like that ambiguous Duck/Rabbit figure, only that here it’s both “Duck” and “Rabbit,” with the Duck being the intuitive naive view and the Rabbit lending that extra mathematical oomph that our culture requires.

Abrahamson will raise the question of why, and under which conditions, students are willing to accept this complementarity, and what this means, more broadly, for mathematics pedagogy.